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The Party of "No"

Technorati and Me

Technorati is indexing me again! They had to make a code change to fix
the problem with my blog getting stuck in their queue. Kudos to Eric M.
and the guys at
GetSatisfaction.com
where they have "community powered support for Technorati".

Well, they're "sorta, kinda" indexing me anyway. It's on a 24 hour tape
delay or something. So I never get picked up by Memeorandum because they
pull from Technorati and Technorati has stuff I posted yesterday
listed as my latest blog entry. And that's old news to Memeorandum.

Wankers.

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The opening of Postal Service retail centers in dozens of Staples stores around
the country is being met with threats of protests and boycotts by the agency's
unions.

The new outlets are staffed by Staples employees, not postal workers, and labor
officials say that move replaces good-paying union jobs with low-wage, nonunion
workers.

"It's a direct assault on our jobs and on public postal services," said Mark
Dimondstein, president of the 200,000-member American Postal Workers Union.

The dispute comes as the financially struggling Postal Service continues to
form partnerships with private companies, and looks to cut costs and boost
revenues. The deal with Staples began as a pilot program in November at 84
stores in California, Georgia, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania as a way make
it easier for customers to buy stamps, send packages or use Priority and
certified mail.

Union leaders fear that if the Staples program is successful, the Postal
Service will want to expand it to more than 1,500 of the company's other
stores. That could siphon work and customers away from nearby brick-and-mortar
post offices, taking jobs from postal workers and even leading traditional
post offices to close.

The union says it's not asking to shut down the program. It wants the counters
to be run by postal employees, not workers hired by Staples. The average postal
clerk earns about $25 an hour, according to the union, plus a generous package
of health and retirement benefits. The Staples post office counters are run by
nonunion workers often making little more than the minimum wage.

It doesn't take a Rhodes Scholar to sell stamps. That job just isn't worth $25
an hour. It never was. Which is why the Post Office loses money. And raising
their prices to cover their labor costs would inevitably send their customers
elsewhere.

The postal workers union did what unions always do, inflated their self-worth
until they priced themselves out of their jobs. So like every other unionized
behemoth before them the Post Office can collapse under the weight of its labor
costs, or it can adapt to reality.

Last month I
wrote about an attempt by the International Association of Machinists and
Aerospace Workers to unionize technical workers at an Amazon.com Inc. warehouse
in Delaware. This was my take back then: "I don't think it's an exaggeration to
say that if unions manage to make substantial inroads at Amazon, it will be the
greatest advance that the labor movement has experienced in decades."

Well, on Wednesday night, workers voted to reject the union. So far, the
citadel of the new economy remains unbreached. The vote wasn't even close:
21 to 6.

Take note Mr. Dimondstein. Unions are going the way of the dinosaur. And not a
moment too soon.